May 24th
George Will today is writing about war legitimacy. Mr. Will
has only a distant acquaintance with war, having been a college student
majoring in religion at Trinity University in 1962 and hence probably draft
exempt during the Viet Nam War. His involvement now is entirely on the
political side, rather like the boy who, hoping for a spectacle, says to his
friend, “Let’s you and him fight.” (I must apologize here to the Council of
Oxford University for mistakenly asserting in a previous blog that Mr. Will had
earned a doctorate from Oxford University. He earned only an M.A. there; his
doctorate was from Princeton University.)
Mr. Will is concerned that the Congress does not exercise
sufficient control over our military involvement abroad. He cites the
Kaine-McCain legislation as a way to more completely involve Congress. This
isn’t likely to matter. Seventy percent of Congress voted to approve Bushes’
invasion of Iraq. The reason was the administration’s insistence that Iraq had,
or would soon have, “methods of mass destruction,” WMDs; by that they meant
atomic weapons.
Some in Congress didn’t believe the CIA briefing; for
example Congressman Ron Paul claimed the CIA man’s body language convinced him
that the man was lying. Lincoln Chaffee, the only Republican Senator to vote
against the resolution, claimed the metal tubes presented as evidence could
have been bought at any hardware store. Well, maybe, but the main point here is
that regardless of the power Congress wields, its members will vote according
to the intelligence they are given; control the intelligence, which any
administration does, and you control how Congress will vote.
In an attempt to bolster its position that Iraq had, or was
planning to produce, WMDs, the administration sent a senior diplomat, Joseph
Wilson, to Niger in search of evidence that Saddam Hussein was buying yellow
cake uranium, a basic material for the production of WMDs. He came back without
it; indeed convinced that they were doing no such thing. This so infuriated the
administration that Robert Novak, a right wing talking head, took his revenge
against Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, an undercover CIA agent. Novak’s outing
of Valerie Plame would ordinarily be a treasonable offense but not for those as
well-connected to the Bush-Cheney government as Robert Novak.
Ultimately no WMDs were found, and that’s in spite of very
intensive searching. Now there is a revisionist position that those who claimed
the Bush-Cheney people were lying about WMDs were themselves lying. What next?
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